Anna is dedicated to engaging a more diverse audience with code and technology especially the LGBTQ+ community. During working hours, Anna is an engineer at Google working on the developer experience for Google Cloud Platform.

Ashlyn Sparrow is an independent game designer. Her work focuses on creating socially impactful games and health focused app interventions. In 2013, Ashlyn was the Learning Technology Director of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago, devoted to creating game-based health interventions supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. During her tenure she designed and led the production of The Source, S.E.E.D, Hexacago Health Academy, Bystander, and Prognosis. In 2018, She became the Assistant Director of the Weston Game Lab (WGL) at the Media Arts, Data, and Design (MADD) Center at the University of Chicago where she teaches undergraduate, graduate and K-12 students how to design their own games while uncovering the sociopolitical implications of their designs. Through WGL, she has developed a series of alternate reality games including Indiecade award-winning game Terrarium, A Labyrinth, and Echo. In addition to her work at WGL, she works as a game designer and programmer in Chicago, having worked on Oni Fighter Yasuke for Waking Oni Games.

Cian Ó Maidín is the CEO of NearForm. Specializing in globally accelerated solution and platform delivery for clients including Condé Nast, Ingka, ADP and WalMart, NearForm are the biggest contributor to the Node.js project with the team contributing 30% of all the code to the latest release, and their contributions to the module eco-system representing about 8% of all the modules downloaded globally each month.

Under Cian’s leadership, NearForm has expanded to become a leader in developing contact tracing apps for national and state governments across Europe and the US. The NearForm app source code is now used from New York to New Zealand.

Jenny Toomey is the Ford Foundation’s international program director for Technology and Society. She also works closely with the Office of the President on a number of initiatives in the groundbreaking field of public interest technology. Previously, she led Ford’s Internet Freedom team, supporting efforts to preserve the open architecture of the Internet and expand access, transparency, innovation, creativity, and participation.

Jenny has advocated for the rights of artists and music lovers on five continents and spoken about music and technology at hundreds of institutions and media outlets. She graduated from Georgetown University with an interdisciplinary major in philosophy, English, and women’s studies.

Jerome Hardaway is Writer at Stack Overflow, Instructor at Front End Masters, Executive Director of Vets Who Code, and Javascript Developer in all of these opportunities. As a writer and instructor, he focuses on those learning how to code and are looking to get their first job as a Web Developer. As an Executive Director he focuses on training and gathering the resources so that veterans can become employed javascript developers, with a focus on Javascript and APIs.

Because of this work he has been highlighted in Wired Magazine and Huffington Post. He was also selected to represent Nashville at Google I/O and was invited to Facebook F8 as well as DreamForce. He has also been honored for his work with veterans at the White House by Barack Obama.

Lin Clark is a Senior Principal Engineer at Fastly, focusing on WebAssembly. She is a co-founder of the Bytecode Alliance, which is driving WebAssembly’s outside-the-browser ecosystem forward. Many people know her through her long-running series, Code Cartoons, which helps people make sense of various WebAssembly standards and the ecosystem’s overall direction. She has worked on web standardization and devtools at Mozilla, helped people understand the JS ecosystem at npm, and was a Drupal core module maintainer.

Saron Yitbarek is the founder of Disco, an audio-first learning platform. She’s also the founder of CodeNewbie (acquired), a podcaster, and developer.

Scott Hanselman is an open source developer who has been coding going on 30 years. He has a podcast with nearly 800 episodes spanning 15 years, an active YouTube and Twitter presence, and has recently entered TikTok as its oldest member who shouldn’t be on TikTok. His goal is to lend his privilege to the next generation of developers and help everyone be happy and successful.

Zainab Ebrahimi is the founder of Florish, a job interview coaching service for developers. She’s also a volunteer CS teacher and a web developer with almost 10 years experience. She’s based out of Brooklyn, NY.